Night Moves (1975)

Night Moves (1975)

starring Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, John Crawford

directed by Arthur Penn

100 minutes

Former actress Arlene Iverson hires private investigator Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) to find Delly, her teenage daughter, who has been missing for two weeks. The search for Delly leads him around Los Angeles and then to the Florida Keys where he finds her hanging around with Tom (John Crawford), her mother's ex-husband, and Paula (Jennifer Warren), Tom's girlfriend.

Harry has problems of his own: Ellen, his wife, has been having an affair. Harry is angry but isn't sure how to respond to her infidelity.

Delly hates her mother and makes subtle attempts to seduce Harry, even though she is only sixteen. Harry does his best to ignore her attempts to reel him in and eventually gets her to agree to return home without doing anything illegal.

Harry reconciles with his wife soon after returning home but only after he makes it very clear how he feels about her sleeping around. Harry learns, just as things are starting to look up, that Delly is dead. She was killed on the set of a movie in a car crash. Harry is convinced that her death wasn't an accident. His investigation leads him back to the Florida Keys where he discovers that there was more going on right under his nose that he didn't realize.

Thoughts

Delly was played by Melanie Griffith. She was 18-years-old at the time the movie was released. I've seen her in a few other films including Working Girl (1988) and Something Wild (1986).

James Woods played the part of Quentin, Delly's boyfriend whom Harry questions during both investigations. He has been in plenty of movies that I've seen. He always seems to be playing a bad guy or someone of questionable character.

This movie is on the whole pretty good. It seemed a little too straight forward at first. The last third of the movie was considerably more complex and interesting. It seemed, up to that point mostly a character piece about Harry Moseby. I'm not sure that everyone will walk away from this film satisfied but it did it for me even though it wasn't everything that I think that it could have been.